[Question] Which scientific discovery was most ahead of its time?

Look­ing into the his­tory of sci­ence, I’ve been struck by how con­tin­u­ous sci­en­tific progress seems. Although there are many ex­am­ples of great in­tel­lec­tual break­throughs, most of them build heav­ily on ex­ist­ing ideas which were float­ing around im­me­di­ately be­fore­hand—and quite a few were dis­cov­ered in­de­pen­dently at roughly the same time (see https://​​en.m.wikipe­dia.org/​​wiki/​​List_of_mul­ti­ple_dis­cov­er­ies).

So the ques­tion is: which sci­en­tific ad­vances were most ahead of their time, in the sense that if they hadn’t been made by their par­tic­u­lar dis­cov­erer, they wouldn’t have been found for a long time af­ter­wards? (Ideally tak­ing into ac­count the over­all rate of sci­en­tific progress: speed­ing things up by a decade in the 20th cen­tury seems about as im­pres­sive a feat as speed­ing things up by half a cen­tury in an­cient Greece).

Cases where sci­en­tific knowl­edge was in fact lost and then re­dis­cov­ered provide es­pe­cially strong ev­i­dence about the dis­cov­ery coun­ter­fac­tauls, e.g. Hero’s eolipile and al-Kindi’s de­vel­op­ment of rel­a­tive fre­quency anal­y­sis for de­cod­ing mes­sages. Prob­a­bly we un­der­es­ti­mate how com­mon such cases are, be­cause the knowl­edge of the lost dis­cov­ery is it­self lost — e.g. we might eas­ily have sim­ply not re­dis­cov­ered the An­tikythera mechanism.

What about Men­delian In­her­i­tance? It was ini­tially dis­cov­ered by Gre­gor Men­del in 1865, but it was seen as be­ing a very nar­row spe­cial case of ge­net­ics un­til about 1900, when de Vries, Cor­rens and von Tscher­mak “re­dis­cov­ered” his work. So that’s about 35 years dur­ing which the statis­ti­cal laws of in­her­i­tance were pub­lished, but weren’t be­ing used or built upon.

Hero’s eolipile was an in­ven­tion that had no prac­ti­cal use. The stream en­g­ine that did have prac­ti­cal use re­lied on high qual­ity brass that wasn’t available at Hero’s time and only available in the late 1600s.

Gen­eral rel­a­tivity is an ob­vi­ous can­di­date. While spe­cial rel­a­tivity was hang­ing in the air, and so was quan­tum me­chan­ics, there was no ur­gency to im­prove on the New­to­nian grav­ity at the time. There were a few small dis­crep­an­cies, like the per­ihe­lion of Mer­cury, but not un­til the dis­cov­ery of ex­pand­ing uni­verse a decade later it was ob­vi­ous that a new the­ory was needed.

Yes, Hilbert for­mu­lated the equa­tions (or at least the Hilbert ac­tion from which the Ein­stein field equa­tions fol­low) at about the same time, a brilli­ant math­e­mat­i­cian that he was, he only needed a few hints and he was fa­mil­iar with Rie­mann’s differ­en­tial ge­om­e­try. The idea that differ­en­tial ge­om­e­try could be use­ful for the de­scrip­tion of grav­ity as a field had been known since at least 1913, af­ter Gross­mann, Ein­stein’s class­mate with whom Ein­stein had been col­lab­o­rat­ing on and off for a few years prior, since maybe 1907, pub­lished his pa­per on the topic. I don’t know the full his­tory, but I was un­der the im­pres­sion that Ein­stein was the main driv­ing force be­hind try­ing to come up with in­cor­po­rat­ing Lorentz in­var­i­ance into a new the­ory of grav­ity.

Pos­si­bly An­tonie van Leeuwen­hoek’s study of microor­ganisms; he made micro­scopes that were much bet­ter than any­one else’s at the time, and he kept his meth­ods se­cret and they weren’t prop­erly re­verse en­g­ineered un­til the 1950s. (Con­ven­tional lens mak­ing tech­niques did catch up, and peo­ple like Robert Hooke had been in­ves­ti­gat­ing biol­ogy on micro scales, but he was prob­a­bly a gen­er­a­tion or so ahead of ev­ery­one else.)

Scien­tific progress is not at all con­tin­u­ous and not sys­tem­at­i­cally for­ward. There have been many pe­ri­ods of sci­en­tific regress. The most fa­mous is the Dark Ages be­tween An­tiquity and Moder­nity, hence Luke’s ex­am­ple of Hero.

But regress is all over the place, even in well-known ex­am­ples of progress, like the Ital­ian Re­nais­sance. Peo­ple of­ten say that Re­nais­sance art be­gan with Giotto or maybe even so speci­fi­cally with his in­ven­tion of per­spec­tive. But, ac­tu­ally, most ac­counts of Re­nais­sance art skip ahead a cen­tury from Giotto’s death in 1337. In par­tic­u­lar, per­spec­tive re­gressed and was rein­vented in 1413 by Brunel­leschi. And this wasn’t even an in­de­pen­dent dis­cov­ery: Brunel­leschi could see Giotto’s work and knew that bet­ter was pos­si­ble. *

Go­ing back to Hero, “an­cient Greece” is a bad cat­e­gory. Hero isn’t the pin­na­cle of an­cient Greek sci­ence, but a figure of a Ro­man era of re­birth af­ter a dark age 150 BC – 50 AD dur­ing which we know the names of no sci­en­tists. In fact, al­most ev­ery­thing Hero writes about he at­tributes to Cte­si­bius (d. 222 BC). If he is truth­ful about his sources, then there was a ei­ther a 250 year pause in pneu­mat­ics or there was more progress that was lost in the in­terim. In gen­eral, a con­tro­ver­sial ques­tion is whether the re­birth in Ro­man Alexan­dria re­con­structed and sur­passed Hel­lenis­tic Alexan­dria or whether it was only able to un­der­stand a few books.

* Loren­zetti (d. 1348) seems to have been pretty good at sin­gle build­ings, but bad at putting them to­gether. Com­pare the only city I can find by Giotto.

There are plenty of ac­ci­den­tal dis­cov­er­ies that we might imag­ine hap­pen­ing much later—but I don’t feel like this should be enough, be­cause it’s not that they were sur­pris­ingly early, they were just drawn out of a very broad prob­a­bil­ity dis­tri­bu­tion.

I’m more satis­fied with dis­over­ies that not only could have hap­pened later, but hap­pened when they did for sen­si­ble lo­cal rea­sons. Ex­am­ple: Onnes’ dis­cov­ery of su­per­con­duc­tivity. Not just be­cause su­per­con­duc­tivity was dis­cov­ered very rapidly (3 years) af­ter the nec­es­sary lique­fac­tion of he­lium, when it con­ceiv­ably could have taken a lot longer to prop­erly mea­sure the re­sis­tance of mer­cury or lead at low tem­per­a­tures. But be­cause Onnes’ lab in Lei­den was the first place to ever make liquid he­lium to cool su­per­con­duc­tors with, and it took 15 years for any­one else in the world (in this case, Toronto) to start liquefy­ing he­lium!

In short, to my mind be­ing ahead of your time is the op­po­site of mul­ti­ple dis­cov­ery—we push back the luck one step by ask­ing not for a lucky break, but for a sen­si­ble and straight­for­ward dis­cov­ery that could only have hap­pened in a very un­usual place.

For clar­ifi­ca­tion, when you say “ahead of its time” do you mean the biggest jump for­ward from what was known at that time, or the fur­thest be­hind when we ex­pect to have benefited from it?

I ask be­cause if you shift from the­o­ries and equa­tions to things like in­ven­tions or pro­cesses, it is to­tally rou­tine to en­counter things that were ac­tu­ally in­vented 50-100 years ago but that never saw the light of day be­cause the ma­te­ri­als were im­pos­si­bly ex­pen­sive or the mar­ket wasn’t around yet.

In as­sess­ing the ques­tion don’t we also need to look at other, prob­a­bly failed and per­haps even “quack­ish dis­cov­er­ies” to get much mean­ing from the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion? What I’m won­der­ing about here is, are we fully iden­ti­fy­ing what was re­ally a good sci­en­tific in­sight or merely the win­ner of a bunch if cre­ative the­o­ries/​ideas from the time?

I think it would also be in­ter­est­ing to con­sider cases where ideas were ini­tially too at odds with the ex­ist­ing state of knowl­edge and largely ig­nored but later re­dis­cov­ered and found to have been in­sights that did lead to ad­vances in knowl­edge—the­o­ret­i­cal and ap­plied.

That would be the com­pan­ion vol­ume to the one about “wrong the­o­ries and sci­en­tific facts we used to ac­cept as true.”